Notification of Machines with Pending Reboot Operations

When patches are delivered to systems that cannot be
rebooted automatically then typically the NO Reboot option is used from within
the KACE console. If nobody is logged
into the system at the time of patching, then the default notifications cannot
pop up on the screen. Those are only
done when someone is logged into the system.
In order to get a notification when you log in, we have to first discover
how to tag systems that are pending a reboot and then be able to target them
with messages as a user logs into the system.
This can be accomplished by using Custom Inventory records, labels and
scripts in the K1000.

Custom Inventory
Rules

This is the primary part of the exercise. There are a few different ways we can do
using the registry, and once these work, we can use these to build labels to
group the machines within the K1000.

Method #1

Create custom inventory record (New Software Item) with the
following Custom Inventory Rule (Here we use Pending Reboot #1):

When using this method since there is not a value to return
as a custom inventory record, the presence of this key will ONLY be recorded as
a software title in Installed Programs.
Here you see both methods producing a software record.

Once you have these rules created, you can force inventory
on machines to see if they are pending reboots, or you can also force just a
custom inventory from the PC by going to a command prompt, and navigating to
the C:\Program Files\Dell\KACE directory (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\KACE
on 64 bit systems) and running the command Kdeploy.exe -CI

Smart Labels

Once we have defined the inventory rules and machines are
checking in, we can define smart labels to automatically group these machines
within the K1000.

NOTE: You MUST have at
least one machine checking in and reporting these custom inventory fields so
that they can be used when creating labels.

In the devices section, create a smart label. When using method #1 above, you would look
for the presence of the CI record.

When using Method #2 we would need to use the Software Title.

Once the Smart labels have been created, force the check in on the machines to validate the labels are being applied correctly.

Using the labels

Now that machines have labels applied, we can use these for
targeting purposes. We can use reboot
scripts to force a reboot at a specified time if needed but we can also use
these for notifications on systems that are pending reboots. Here we will show how we can setup
notifications via email to notify the system administrator when we have
machines that are pending reboots. We
will also show how we can use a script to pop up a dialog box to the user if
they login to a system that is pending a reboot.

Creating a Notification Alert

On the devices page, click on Notification in the upper
right of the page

Create the notification based on the label names created
above. In this case we will look for
labels that contain the words Pending Reboot.
Make sure you test your notification to validate you have correctly
discovered machines that fit this label.

This will send out an email Daily to the recipient to let
them know the machines that are currently pending a reboot.

Creating Pop Up notifications on the client machines

If the client machines are not being forcibly rebooted with
the patching mechanism, we might want to be notified when the client is pending
a reboot. Using the patching
notifications will work but only if the computers are logged in. In the case of servers that are typically not
logged into during patching, this will be useful to let the next person to
login know that the system was patched recently and needs to complete a reboot
to finish the patch installation. To be
notified on next login, we need to have scripts pop up message windows at the
time someone logs into the machine.

Script to prompt user that Reboots
are pending

In the K1000 Create a new Offline Script (this will allow us
to set the options to run at user login).

Select Windows systems, and also select the labels from
above so we are targeting machines that are pending reboot only.

In the options for schedule, select “Also Execute after
Login (before desktop loads)”

You may want to schedule this to run at a specific interval as well, you can set to run as low as every 15 minutes if needed but be careful as this can add a bit of a load on the K1000.

Add a new task to pop up a dialog box with the message that
you want to display.

You should see the following pop up message on machines that
are marked as pending reboot.

Note that this will NOT reboot the system, just simply let
the user know that the system needs a reboot.